ספר הבהיר: [מאמר ביקורת]

Daniel Abrams fills an important gap in the study of Jewish mysticism by presenting the first critical edition of Sefer ha-Bahir, which is considered to be the first work of the Kabbala. Abrams' edition is based on the two earliest dated manuscripts of the Bahir: MS Munich 209, presented as the base text of the edition, with variants provided from MS Vatican Barberini Or. 110. Apart from the edition of the text, the book includes a variety of important data for the study of the Bahir, such as early citations from the work, photocopies of the first printed edition of the text and the Bahir passages printed in the Zohar Cremona edition. Abrams introduces his edition with interesting investigations into the history and redaction of the Bahir. An introduction by Moshe Idel discusses the status of the Bahir among various thirteenth-century kabbalistic schools. An important feature of Abrams' book is his emphasis on data pertaining to the reception of the text. The edition includes a list of the Bahir manuscripts and prints, and a comprehensive annotated list of works in manuscript and print which cite it, as well as listings of translations and commentaries on the text. A survey of the data brought in the book reveals some interesting patterns in the reception history of the Bahir. Cited for the first time by the kabbalists of Gerona in the first half of the thirteenth century, the Bahir gained a central place among the Catalan kabbalists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The appearance of the Zohar in the late thirteenth century diminished the central position of the Bahir among the kabbalists. Yet, this process encountered an opposition among several of them. There is evidence that Catalan kabbalists of the school of Nahmanides and the Rashba rejected the Zohar and accepted only the Bahir as the ancient, canonical kabbalistic text. Other kabbalists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries accepted the Zohar alongside the Bahir (as well as Sefer Yeẕira) as part of the kabbalistic canon. From the sixteenth century there was a tendency to regard the Bahir as part of the Zoharic corpus. This came to the fore in the printing of the Bahir in the Cremona edition of the Zohar. In his introduction Abrams says that his book is not intended to conclude the research into the Bahir but to offer source material and bibliographical data for the further research of others. Undoubtedly, Abrams' work will become a major tool for scholars of Jewish mysticism and advance the study of the Bahir.